The Weight Of Grief Masterlist-

Happy birthday Wei Wuxian!

I'm so happy to share my first playlist about this amazing character!

Timestamps are on the way

The Untamed x Harper’s Bazaar making

😂😂 swanqueen song for all of you! Enjoy!

I have to go there, one day😭😍

0 thoughts head empty, it’s the bench

I usually don't fuck with the idea of Max being Silver's wife in TI. My primary reasoning for this is how intentionally the writers set up SilverMadi as a romantic pairing. Whether you like it or not, everything in BS leads to TI. Why Madi chose to stay with Silver post-BS (in both senses of the acronym), I don't know. But Silver canonically has a Black wife in TI. So she does.

BUT there is such a good and angsty reason that Max as Silver's wife (or "wife" for whatever non-romantic reason they have to take those titles) works. Also, the character parallels it gives... Pardon me if this has been discussed before. I just couldn't stop thinking about it once I came to the realization!

Shortly after the conclusion of BS, the real-life Jack Rackham and fellow pirates were arrested and killed; Mary/Mark Read dies in jail after having their sentence postponed due to alleged pregnancy. Anne Bonny is also allegedly pregnant and has her sentence commuted, then disappears. Let's presume that these events play out for BS' characters.

Anne and Max can't marry; Jack and Anne aren't by preference. Jack and Max coexist (with the addition of Mark/Mary, maybe). Silver cannot legally marry Madi (I think? Not entirely clear on that) but certainly they would face serious backlash, especially if people found out it was a loving marriage. Plus, like the whole (ex-)pirate and revolutionaries thing. Also, Madi wouldn't marry him, at least not immediately. In this AU, Madi leaves Silver's ass (as she should), and they never speak again.

So where does that leave Max and Silver? Essentially, as a divorcee and a widow, respectively (if you ignore the complications of their specific circumstances). If you disregard questions of legality, both Silver and Max had relationships that could be defined as marriage. Max (and Silver) would also need to get out of Dodge Nassau quickly after the cards fall (i.e., Jack and Anne's capture). They've worked together before and can compartmentalize well enough to work together now - plus they're tired and lonely and hey, even if we were enemies I respect your cleverness and you're a familiar face.

Civilization won't accept an unmarried couple running an inn, and Max needs the protection of marriage in England. They would get judged still but less than Silver and Madi would. Here's where the parallels kick in. Both Max and Silver were part of a trio of some kind of romantic nature. Both are similar in their approaches to life - they were each other's first allies for a reason - and both have gotten exactly what they wanted (on paper). Max got her safety and power AND got to keep Anne. Silver kept Madi alive and stopped the war, and that now has to be enough for him, or else Flint was right. They were both married - in the purest and idealistic sense. But no more. Silver is divorced, and Max is a widow.

So now, with their dreams shattered and no one to blame but themselves (with some caveats for Max, of course), they only have each other. So they get married. Now they have a 'real' marriage that is recognized by Civilization. But it isn't authentic.

Silver got what he wanted: stability and a life away from piracy. Max got stability, retained (some) of her dignity, and (a fraction of) power. Isn't that what they wanted? And so time flows onwards. Eventually Silver returns to Skeleton Island, leaving his wife behind.

There’s nothing in Nassau but horror. You said it was just a transition. That something better lay beyond it, something meaningful. But what if that isn’t so? What if the result of this war isn’t beyond the horror? What if it is the horror itself? Have you given this any thought at all? If we are to truly reach a moment where we might be finished with England… cleared away to make room for something else… there most certainly lies a dark moment between here and there. A moment of terror where everything appears to be without hope.

BLACK SAILS 4.08 “XXXVI.”

It's the way they and the people who know them refere to those years in New Providence as a dream.

Some say it was a nightmare, and yes, it probably was, especially for James.

But you can't find in a nightmare someone who is so similar to you that you end up so often being unable to face for the fear of facing your same insecurities. You can't find someone who choses to walk by your side for the whole, dark and unsteady road toward a blurred, almost impossible future, just to make it possible for the two of you. You can't find someone who choses to love you without restrain, and to trust you, in the name of that love, giving their own life away in the hope that you will save yours.

This, you may find only in a dream. This is what they both did, in their own way, for one another. Miranda understood it. James almost did.

It's the way you go from bright colors but cold lights in 1705 to dark colors but warmer, secret, intimate lights in 1715.

Really, that's all.

It’s like she’s some sort of clock that’s finally struck its chime and woken me from this dream we’ve been living, reminded me how many years separate me from a world I still think of as home. How unrecognizable the woman I am now would be to the woman I was then.

Lately I found myself thinking about James/Miranda relationship as a reversed version of Orpheus and Eurydice’s story, especially towards the end of it. Not because these two stories match well (they do not) but just because I like making this kind of classical comparisons and I'm stuck from a bit on the fact that, right before her death, for the first time Miranda was the one to refuse the progress to look back at the past. 

After the loss of Thomas, James let himself slip into a darkness comparable to the underworld, a darkness which so often threatened to swallow him whole. He walked on a thin line between a reign of death and an island of life, and if that darkness was that reign, Miranda was his island. 

During their whole journey of processing their grief and climbing their way back to a life that could be called such, she was the one always trying to drag him towards the light. To her, the life that might have been waiting for them in the future was that light, while the past was the darkness, and not because she deemed it forgettable or unimportant, quite the contrary indeed, but because while she knew how to keep and remember the beauty of that past and the light of it, along with the sorrow, she knew perfectly well how different it was for James. How he could remember the beauty of it, of course, but also knew how to put it aside in favor of the rage and the guilt, his gaze clouded by the pain and the unacceptable shame. 

She said it herself: she didn't want to forget that past, not the bright side of it and neither the inescapable sadness of it, its tragedy being the spring of that very beauty, the ruins existing only because there was something precious to be ruined in the first place; and at the same time, what could the dark of it matter, the injustice, the grudge, when it condemned the both of them to never be able to see the light again? 

First time I heard their discussion in ep.VII after knowing the whole story, I wondered how could she ask something like that of him, to forget and pass over what they had done to him just to gain a liveable life, but recently I've actually been wondering : how could she not?

I'm not taking any side in this, as I recognize Miranda's thoughts to be the most reasonable ones as they often are but at the same time I can't say I wouldn't act as stubbornly and desperately as James did in that situation, they're just really different ways to conceive one’s own existence, influenced by their own problems and conditions and mind. All I'm saying is that Miranda was able to see the light even if just from a distance, she was able to hope that one day they would have been able to truly see it. James was never. 

He just lied to himself about the possibility of it. He had plans and tactics and strategies, but for how I see it, those were all desperate attempts to convince himself of the contrary. He couldn't, maybe because of his personality, maybe because he knew that his situation wasn't one that could ever allow him to found real light in that world, maybe just because he loved her less than how much he had loved Thomas, less than how much she loved him, but whichever was the reason, he couldn't afford to see the light after that abyss, and I think Miranda was the first to know that. The one who knew him like no other, the one who loved him like no other. She knew that without help he would have never really been able to reach the end of that dark state of being. And she tried. She tried to help him in so many ways, because she loved him, she really did, and because she had the damn right to claim at least a decent life for herself. 

And here we come to the end, to Charles town.

Charles town could have been her success. Charles town was James’ surrender. For the first time she glimpsed one real chance of having him back, she saw in him the real intention to leave all of that darkness behind, to follow her, not leaving the past behind, never, but learning to move forward, finally allowing her a chance for a new life together. 

He was actually ready to accept even that miserable condition Peter Ashe imposed on him in order to get rid of the darkness, to climb to the light -as short lived as that might have been, at this point- to give Miranda a better alternative than the ones he had been able to grant her up until that moment (as I think his whole Charles town plan was led by the purpose of doing something to save her): as useless as we all know that would have been, accepting that bargain has probably been the most selfless thing James has ever done, even if he did it also for himself in a tired, desperate and contorted way. 

But Charles town wasn't only this to Miranda. 

Charles town was the discovery of the betrayal, because I believe she understood it all the moment she first saw that clock, I'm sure of it. Charles town was her umptheen attempt and her umptheen sacrifice. 

I think that must have been to her a similar quest to the Maria Aleyne's one: respecting James by telling him the truth, something he deserves to know, even knowing how he will react to it, knowing how impossible it would become for him, then, to go on with his plan, granting him a one way ticket to that darkness, or keeping him in the dark, bearing alone the weight of that knowledge, accepting to live with the helplessness to remedy that fatal injustice, only in the hope to finally make him reach that light?  

Would Orpheus reveal Eurydike a truth which risked pushing her back into the underworld just because it might be right for her to know it?

Still, things had been different, more desperate, back to the Maria Aleyne. Now the chance to succeed was real. 

And at first she made that difficult choice, which was selfish in a way, but definitely selfless in another, all at the same time.

And she did it because she loved him. 

She loved him so much that when she glimpsed, in that light, the prospect of losing him, she had to recognize that that light was -as James would have put it in the future- only their light, the light of a world the two of them couldn’t be part of anymore. 

She loved him so much that she had to look back. To the past, to him, because her James was still behind her, still in the dark, the only place where he was allowed to stay, and only that version of him was the one she truly loved. She loved the real James, with all his broken parts, not the one that could be seen under the lights of their lies. 

So she couldn't help giving up that false light, because she had wished for tranquility, a normal life -as probably anyone in her conditions would have done- but she was not disposed to give up the man she loved in order to gain that, as she hadn't been in the past, when the prospect of the future had been only dark and still she had not deserted the ones she loved. 

And when she turned back, this time trying to shield him from that light, the darkness at the pit ended up swallowing them both. 

Miranda died, and James was dragged back full force and imprisoned into the worst version of himself, the ruthless, autodestructive one. 

There are two versions of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and I think that the two of them taken together perfectly represent James’ reaction to her death and its circumstances.

In Virgilius’ one, Eurydice slightly resents Orpheus for his action, for his “folly” -as it is called- and (if we may call it that) for his selfish gesture of looking back, that she paid with her second chance to be alive. 

After Miranda's death, James dreams of her reminding him how he had resented her “because they were so close” and of course since that's a dream is what he knew he had felt. But that was…collateral to the condition he had been left stuck in. That was the childish resentment of having explicitly denied something he knew deep down he couldn't have. 

In Ovidius’ one instead Eurydice doesn't blame him because she can't resent being loved, and I think this is what James really felt. After all, looking straight at the truth of the situation and looking back at their shared history, I think there were no ways for him to actually, rationally resent her. (And in fact in his last dream about her she uses a past tense, “you resented me”, hinting that was something he had felt only in the moments when he was at his worst as when, always in the dream, he heard her apology).

Moreover, I think he perfectly understood the meaning of those last moments of hers, how important it was to her to make her voice be heard in that moment. In fact, despite the clear and growing doubt and rage (and worry) on his face while Peter and Miranda spoke, he didn't say a word, he let her speak, despite knowing the risks  and I think this is amazing and just proves how beautiful and respectful their relationship was, and that there were no way he could actually deem her responsible of their failure in that mission (doomed to failure since the beginning ‘cause of the truth).

What hurts even more about her death is the fact that it looks like they got closer to each other once again during that trip, as they hadn't probably been in years, and then…everything got lost forever.

I'm trying to get back into the groove of things. I am currently diving headfirst into one of my oldest hyper fixations. I finished this a few days ago after taking too long to work on it, but well....

My translation of Chapter 1 of Mo Dao Zu Shi's Japanese manga, which released yesterday (the 17th of August 2024)

Also loaded to the internet archive as a pdf (pretty big file size though)

You can support the official Japanese release and buy the Japanese manga at cmoa.jp

it's pretty inexpensive, only around $2 per chapter!

Chapter - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3 - Chapter 4

Mangadex link

Pre-sfx version is still available at the archive.org website

Edit: I originally wasn't going to make any further edits but felt bad that someone could come across my initial rough translation and miss some details or nuance because of it. Made some changes, a changelog detailing everything and why is here. (I think) this is the final version